We Rely On Your Support: This site is primarily supported by advertisements. Ads are what have allowed this site to be maintained for the past 13 years. We do our best to ensure only clean, relevant ads are shown, when any nasty ads are detected, we work to remove them ASAP. If you would like to view the site without ads while still supporting our work, please consider our ad-free Phoronix Premium. You can also consider a tip via PayPal.

The CompuLab
Trim-Slice is quite an interesting dual-core ARM Tegra 2 device. This nettop/desktop-oriented
system ships with Ubuntu 11.04 by default, but it is also well supported by Arch
Linux. In this article are some tests of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.0GHz system
running under Arch.

In communicating with CompuLab about the Trim-Slice Linux support,
they mentioned a variety of distributions are working on support for this NVIDIA
Tegra 2 device. In fact, on the
Trim-Slice Wiki is a listing of the distributions that are on there for working
on Trim-Slice support -- either official support or community-spawned projects.
The list at the time of publishing includes Android, Arch Linux, Chromium OS,
Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Java SE, MeeGo, and XBMC.

While Fedora and Ubuntu work on the compact ARM system -- and
Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" for ARM is what ships -- CompuLab ended
up recommending Arch Linux. Igor Vaisbein, the Trim-Slice project manager at CompuLab,
had a few words to say to Phoronix about the different Linux distributions supported.

"Arch Linux and MeeGo communities have been working very
actively with the Trim-Slice. There is also some work done for Fedora, Debian
and Gentoo," said Igor. More interestingly, he notes that Arch Linux
for the Trim-Slice is built with the hard floating-point support. "The ARM
Linux community is very keen on hardfp compiled code for performance. Ubuntu on
Trim-Slice is softfp so there is probably potential for some performance improvement.
As far as I know the best optimized hardfp distro for Trim-Slice is Arch Linux."

The ARM community around Arch Linux in fact is quite active and
just not for the Trim-Slice device. At ArchLinuxARM.org
is a site devoted to bringing up Arch Linux on ARM platforms. Besides the ARMv7
Trim-Slice, they also have guides for starting Arch Linux on other devices like
the PogoPlug, TonigoPlug,
and other storage devices like the Seagate DockStar. In terms of their ARMv7 coverage,
with the Trim-Slice is also the BeagleBoard, BeagleBoard-xM, Gumstix Overo, and
PandaBoard.

The information for setting up Arch Linux on the Trim-Slice can
be found on this page,
complete with an Arch Linux ARM build catered towards this CompuLab ARM device.

With the setup process being well documented for the Trim-Slice
(as I've said many times before in the forums and elsewhere, I'm happy to run
more "custom" test scenarios assuming the project clearly documents the steps
for the public to provide greater reproducibility and recommendations as to some
"defaults") and many Phoronix readers being interested in Arch Linux,
I decided to give this ARM spin a shot.

The overall process of bringing up Arch Linux on the Trim-Slice
was quite straightforward and easy. By default the ARMv7 Arch Linux build for
the Trim-Slice doesn't ship with a desktop environment or even the X.Org Server,
but one can be easily installed via the Pacman package management system, along
with any other packages you may be after. The Phoronix Test Suite can also be
installed from the Arch repository, but for this benchmarking I was running the Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland
Git code for the greatest ARM hardware/software detection support via Phodevi.

On the software side of this dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Tegra-2 platform
was the Linux 2.6.38-3-ARCH armv7l Linux kernel, an EXT2 file-system, and the
GCC 4.6.2 compiler as the key components.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our Amazon.com or NewEgg.com shopping links when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip.